“In Italy, architects like us, under 35 years old, are not considered able to pull off a public project, but YAP shows that, we, as generation, can demonstrate the opposite.”—Simone Capra, stART

“It bothers me that primarily wealthy individuals and well-funded institutions engage with architects. This may sound incredibly presumptuous or haughty—that a little upstart nonprofit could contribute anything to the promotion of a profession hundreds of years old—but I am talking about the significance of small conversations across disciplines.”—Mitch McEwen, Superfront

“Built work—whether in installations or ‘bricks and mortar’—is both a crucial form of engagement and ever more difficult to achieve due to the institutionalization of so many building practices. There are fewer design-centric architecture projects to do out there. It is not a new problem, but it is hard to get new interesting or challenging work built in the U.S. in this climate. The schools have become crucial to supporting the next generation.”—Barbara Bestor

“[Students] take classes about ‘social design’ but end up sourcing bathroom fixtures for luxury apartment units. [With ‘Holding Pattern’] we spent a good amount of time talking to taxi-management companies, libraries, high schools, senior and daycare centers, community gardens, the post office, and dozens of other Long Island City–based institutions. We feel like a part of the neighborhood and that makes us happy.”—Dan D’Oca, Interboro

“If we are to change the terms of production, thinking, and action, the younger generation—the one that is fearless, full of intuition more than knowledge, with vectors of desire more than with constructed paths of action—is the one that needs to take the lead in shaping the future that lies ahead.”—Eva Franch i Gilabert

May 17, 2011

Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, my follow up book to Tiny Houses, quietly slipped into the marketplace on March 21. No fanfare, just another title for the shelves, but slowly, over the last few weeks, momentum has built up and there's been some really cool publicity.

Over at the Brooklyn Rail, Helen Mitsios reviewed the book. Framing it as a study in personal utopias she writes, "The Micro Green homes resonate with another era—one in which people rejected the boredom of consumer society, opposed war, and organized protests to nuclear weapons." I think my growing up in Berkeley in the seventies is showing.

I love that Wallpaper snappily calls escaping to a cabin in the woods the "full Thoreau." They also include a multi-page slideshow.

Finally, in John Hill's review over at A Weekly Dose of Architecture, he took a shine to the more DIY houses in the book: Michael Janzen's Tiny Free House and Derek and Dustin Diedrickson's Backwoods Skyscraper. These two scrappy projects are very much a little 'a' take on architecture and perhaps best represent the trend within small house living for a kind of hand-crafted agency.

I'll be joining the irrepressible Derek "Deek" Diedrickson in July for the Tiny House/Shelter Workshop in Stoughton, MA, which will be a howling good time. There is nothing quite like giving a writer power tools.

The answers were varied, personal, and for the most part went beyond the standard cliches of architectural practice. By looking at the tactical side of recessionary practice, the conversation re-evaluated the vocabulary architects and designers use to explain what they do. I was surprised at the acknowledgment of the messy issues of interdisciplinary practice and, even thought the term "expanded architect" is a bit overkill at moment, the variety of roles designers are taking on—entrepreneur, cultural capitalist, publisher, NGO— and the kinds of projects, small and large, they're tackling.

I was also surprised that at a point in history where cynicism would be forgiven, the answers were forward thinking, not nihilistic. Bryan Boyer wrote: "I look to skills such as negotiation, translation, and optimism as survival tactics in the post-2008 era. I’m taking tactics to mean skills or maneuvers that can be developed through practice. Even optimism needs to be practiced every now and then."

The question is one I lifted from the first Interventionist Toolkit piece over at Places Journal. And I'll be presenting the Interventionist Toolkit research to the Right to the City symposium in Sydney at the end of next week as part of a panel entitled "Tactics for DIY Cities." And the question from above plays a role as I look at how recessionary-era work employs tactics of DIY and arts activism to create urban change. I’m also very excited to share the panel with artist Marjetica Potrč. I can’t wait to hear more about her current projects that blend art installations with social justice and infrastructural thinking.

...Or considerA User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible, published by the arts group Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination to correspond with the Long Weekend, an action organized by Arts Against Cuts and held at Goldsmiths college in London in early December 2010. The event was held to protest Prime Minister David Cameron’s reduction of government funding for British higher education, a spending cut of nearly 40 percent that targeted arts, humanities and social sciences while protecting the budgets of science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs. Held just days before a major MP vote, the 48-hour event offered a series of resistance workshops. The downloadable user’s guide presented a history of art activist strategies. Included were interventionist examples such as The Tactical Ice Cream Unit; created by The Center for Tactical Magic, the TICU is an ice cream van that not only serves up scoops but also distributes radical literature to local communities and acts as a grassroots mobile communications hub. Another project profiled in the guide is the mid-1960s project, The Free Store; created in the mid-1960s by the Diggers (a group of San Francisco artists and actors, and later called the Free City Collective), the Free Store used tactics that we now see as familiar: it occupied an abandoned storefront, and inside, it distributed goods, food and health services for free or exchange. Recognizing the incendiary nature of the pamphlet, User's Guide authors Gavin Grindon and John Jordan write: "This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It's a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.'"

March 06, 2011

Last week, my Op-Ed, Only Collect went up on Domusweb, asking "In a post-print era, what do we hoard?" And I suggest "that the archive itself has become not a mode of collection, but the thing in itself to be collected." I join other lgnlgn opioners Enrique Ramierz and Mario Ballesteros.

Continually mouthy, this Tuesday I'll participate in the third of a three-part series of debates on the future of architecture criticism organized by Domus. The first two were in London and Milan. Critical Futures #3 will bring together a number of writers, critics and academics to mull and mourn over the fate of criticism as formats change. It is sure to be lively.

Over the past decade, several transformations regarding media and communication systems, among others, have reshaped the context within which architecture is conceived and debated. The Internet has made images and information free and instantly ubiquitous; magazines, once the undisputed platforms for the criticism of architecture and design, have been challenged to redefine their purpose and economic model in the light of dwindling readerships; blogs have given a global audience, potentially of millions, to anyone with an Internet connection. In all of this, the continued relevance of architecture criticism as practiced today has been put in doubt: as Alexandra Lange writes, "Online, both everyone and no one is a critic, and architecture talk proliferates, often in the absence of buildings."

Is criticism in the traditional sense still relevant or useful, and can it be more than the legitimation of the new? If the role of the print publication in contemporary production irreversibly declines, what is its future? Will online publishing (from press-release feed blogs to the few bastions of criticism online sites) ever be able to fill this void? What forces might shape architectural production in a post-critical environment?

As we head into spring I'll add more thoughts and examples to the Toolkit. But here's a taste of the first installment:

...Previous economic crises have offered up examples: paper architecture, the growth of theoretical and artistic practice, in the 1970s and '80s; the lost generation, young designers leaving the architecture for virtual realms, in the '90s; and paperless architecture, the rise of formal digital experimentation, in the early '00s....

Our current recession is inspiring its own strategies and tactics: It's increasingly a catch-all for a host of urban interventions. This is a trend that I like to describe with a mouthful of a title: Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism. With this verbaciousness, I hope to capture the tactical multiplicity and inventive thinking that have cropped up in the vacuum of more conventional commissions. These days vacant lots offer sites for urban farming, mini-golf, and dumpster pools. Trash recycles into a speculative housing prototype (see the Tiny Pallet House). Whether it’s The Living’s Amphibious Architecture or Mark Shepard's Serendipitor, the built environment speaks through mobile devices. Retail spaces hit by the recession are fodder for reinvention, as the art organization No Longer Empty transforms unleased storefronts into temporary galleries. Even the street itself is reclaimed. REBAR’s annual initiative, Park(ing) Day, urges global participants to use a pranksters wit to turn parking spaces into pocket parks, one quarter at a time.

Driven by local and community issues and intended as polemics that question conventional practice, these projects reflect an ad hoc way of working; they are motivated more by grassroots activism than by the kind of home-ec craft projects (think pickling, Ikea-hacking and knitting) sponsored by mainstream shelter media, usually under the Do-It-Yourself rubric. (Although they do slot nicely into the imperative-heavy pages of Good and Make magazines.) They are often produced by emerging architects, artists and urbanists working outside professional boundaries but nonetheless engaging questions of the built environment and architecture culture. And the works reference edge-condition practitioners of earlier generations who also faced shifts within the profession and recessionary outlooks: Gordon Matta Clark, Archigram, Ant Farm, the early Diller + Scofidio, among others....

....Still, there’s a tendency to dismiss these kinds of projects as simply whimsical — to smile at their authenticity or their expression of clever détournement, but at the same time to suppress any uncomfortable restive rumblings. But these projects hold at their heart a belief that change is possible despite economic or political obstacles, or disciplinary or institutional inertia. And the prospect for real change builds as more and more works accumulate in exhibition catalogues and digital venues. Broadcast via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and design blogs, these new temporary or provisional projects can be read relationally to each other without explicit contextual concerns. By aggregating and focusing upon these small-scale interventions, my hope is to reveal a larger framework — a network that makes nimble use of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies to transform local episodes into global outreach. Thus The Interventionist’s Toolkit — a series that will light upon Places from time to time this winter and spring — is not necessarily about featuring projects, but about finding new ways to practice and provoke within the fields of architecture, urbanism, and design.

To kick off the night, I presented An Infrastructure for Manifestos. AKA, a framework for manifesting built on pastiche. Here's the cheat sheet:

1. REJECT all previous MANIFESTOS

2. DESPISE

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to infrastructure, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking designers only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the urban realm.”

“Infrastructuralism succeeds modernism as a new wave of systematic innovation. The style finally closes the period of uncertainty engendered by the crisis of modernism, marked by a series of short-lived episodes including postmodernism, deconstructivism, and minimalism. The new style claims universal relevance for all architectural programs, on all scales from architecture and interior design to large-scale urban design. Infrastructuralism is also uniquely geared to engage with the ecological challenges that architecture must address. Both in terms of techniques and in terms of sensibility, Infrastructuralist architecture is eager and able to elaborate adaptive responses to diverse environmental parameters.”

"Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Infrastructural opportunists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual-blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with the city."

"Our infrastructure is the building material of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era. For this reason it does not conform to the ideals of the first, while those of the second have yet to be formulated. But it is the expression of a life force that is all the stronger for being resisted….

The old infrastructure is too stale to serve as a drug any longer. The chalkings on pavements and walls clearly show that human beings were born to manifest themselves…. A bridge, a highway, a cell tower, or a digital network is not a composition of color and line but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these things together. … Every natural or artificial form possesses for the active onlooker. This suggestive power knows no limits and so one can say that after a period in which it meant NOTHING, infrastructure has now entered an era in which it means EVERYTHING."

"Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Infrastructure is not necessarily good. Infrastructure is an exploration of unlit recesses (sewers, canals, tunnels) that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real infrastructure.

"By the grace of Heaven and in rare moments of inspiration which transcend the will, architecture may unconsciously blossom from the labour of his hand, but a base in infrastructure is essential to every urbanist."

“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

“Seeking opportunistic associations between economy, ecology, politics, and information, coupling is not simply a combinatory exercise so much as a typological investigation into new spatial formats for the 21st century. “

November 16, 2010

Celebrate pinkcomma gallery’s relocation to 46 Waltham Street at our inaugural opening in the new studio. The event, Newsstand, will present a collection of architecture and design-related broadsheets, newsprints, and ephemera. We'll also be hosting a classifieds drive for the New City Reader.

Newsstand is the third in a series of exhibitions on contemporary architectural publishing. Following on A Few Zines (related to design zines and magazines) and Publishing Practices (on the influence of architecture books), Newsstand examines another print medium: the newspaper. Inexpensive printing, rapid dissemination, and expanded dimensions make the newspaper a topical platform for architecture and design discourse—even in an increasingly digital world. In order to investigate the motivations behind this tendency, the exhibit presents imaginative examples of the genre from the past several years

October 09, 2010

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Now books are written by the public and read by nobody." –Oscar Wilde

The popularity of the aphorism, a short, memorable, often pithy statement, goes hand in hand with the invention of printing. Throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, aphorisms and maxims were published globally in thick, bound collections. Although print remains precarious in a digital age, the aphoristic statement lives on.

For last night's Book Launch Cabaret at Storefront for Art and Architecture to celebrate Studio-X's newest release, The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation (GSAPP Books, 2010), edited by Gavin Browning, I presented Maximum Maxim MMX a zine, in slideshow form, maximized with maxims germane to architecture and publishing.

October 06, 2010

I'm excited to participate in the Book Launch Cabaret at Storefront this Friday, October 8 at 7pm. A Few Zines was the first show at Studio-X New York and it included in the new "The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation." (A beautiful book edited by the fabulous Gavin Browning and designed by MTWTF.)

I'll be performing Maxium Maxim, a riff on the aphorism collections that go hand in hand with the invention of printing.

August 23, 2010

Saturday, as I was walking around Bushwick, the wind picked up and blew in the first fall breeze. That gust tells me that summer is rapidly coming to a close. The first part of my summer was spent finishing up Micro Green. Then, the last month went by so fast that I didn't have a chance to post any of my recently published writing. So, here, in an inelegant list, is the summer writing round up:

When architect Robert Siegel received the commission to design the United States Land Port of Entry in Calais, Maine, the easternmost border crossing between the U.S. and Canada, he didn’t instantly start sketching—he went on a road trip. In the middle of winter, Siegel and project manager Eduardo Ramos left their New York office, jumped in the car and visited more than 20 border-control stations in the Northeast. Driving back and forth between the two nations was revealing, even as it raised a few patrol officers’ eyebrows. The architecture at each crossing was universally banal, if not downright off-putting: acres of asphalt, bad signage, and antiquated and undistinguished buildings. Not exactly a warm welcome to the United States.

Compared with, say, the financial-services industry, architecture has
been slow to catch on to every technological trend. And while the IT lag
was made worse by the economic downturn and a reluctance to invest in
new hardware, the move into the cloud is coming along at just the right
time. With cheaper hardware and software refreshes, it’s a competitive
boon for smaller practices lacking the in-house computational might of
larger firms.

Dine: "I want this apartment to be an inspirational place. It’s very stimulating for the children to have all of this visual material to look at–—like an original Sex Pistols poster. It’s not a piece of art, but I treat it like art or a design object. I don’t listen to the Sex Pistols every day, but it’s a memory, a moment, a time: New York in 1977."

(This piece also got some attention on Unhappy Hipsters, which featured (skewered) not one, two, but three images from the photo shoot.)

Going green is, unfortunately, new to New Orleans. Lagging behind most major municipalities, it’s still without a citywide recycling program. But architect Coleman Coker of buildingstudio is out to raise awareness and, so far, reactions have been positive. “We were surprised when lots of people came to the opening and started telling us about their own retention ponds and backyard cisternsŃthey’re watering vegetable gardens and breeding dragonflies,” says Coker excitedly. “It has a small, but important, impact on a city that is rebuilding itself.”

William L. Murphy, of the eponymous bed, came to his design because (like Bauge) he lived in a small, one-room apartment but liked to entertain. Murphy patented his invention at the turn of the last century and it quickly gave rise to comedy skits, including Charlie Chaplin’s epic battle in the 1916 silent film One A.M.